Your Deepest Need
The Company We Keep, prt. 2
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
May 9, 2009
1 Jn 4:17-18 (The Message)
17God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us, so that we’re free of worry on Judgment Day—our standing in the world is identical with Christ’s. 18There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love.
Some psychologists believe that there really are only two primary emotions – fear and love. The idea is that all negative emotions (anger, depression, jealousy, etc.) stem from fear, and all positive emotions (peace, joy, enthusiasm, etc.) stem from love. Do you buy that? After really thinking deeply about this lately, I buy it completely, and if you don’t see it I hope you’ll do the mental work that is required for it to become clear.
How do you define love? Love is a commitment to the well-being of another person. That’s love. When you love someone, you want good things for them. When you want good things for someone, you are loving them. We know God is love. And God, who is love, says:
Je 29:11 (NIV)
11For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
God loves us, and therefore he desires our good. He wants to prosper us, not harm us. He wants to give us hope and a future. That is what love does, right moms?
I think very few people in this room believe that God is love. Most have probably professed it. Some have taught it to others. But most of us don’t believe it. Because when you really believe something, it affects your emotions and what happens in your body and your decisions. If you believed a man with a gun was about to come forward tonight and open fire, you would be sitting there in a very different condition than you are in right now – if you’d even be sitting there at all.
If I deeply believed that God is love – deeply believed that God desires my well-being, wants what’s best for me, intends good things for me, and will redeem everything in my life for good, no matter how terrible it might seem, I would live my life free from fear. Completely. I would not fear what others might do to me physically. I would not fear for my reputation. I would not worry about getting older. As I worked on a project at home that was going poorly, I would not take it personally and feel incompetent because I would know God loved me completely and there was no reason to fear being diminished in his eyes. If I really, truly, deeply, fundamentally trusted in God and in God’s perfect love, I would simply not be capable of responding in fear. Well-formed love banishes fear.
Job 5:20 & 26 (The Message)
20“In famine, he’ll keep you from starving, in war, from being gutted by the sword…26You’ll arrive at your grave ripe with many good years, like sheaves of golden grain at harvest.
We read this and immediately start looking for exceptions. We say, “What about Christ-followers who ARE gutted by the sword, or those who do not live long lives?” Where does this question come from? My friends, it comes from fear. We see those (fairly rare) cases and we automatically think, “Isn’t that evidence that God doesn’t love me, isn’t looking out for my good, and doesn’t intend to protect me? Isn’t it evidence that, at least in the case of those who experienced these terrible things, that he did not love THEM?”
When it comes to God’s love, we just can’t stop twitching. We want to believe it, yet we look around at a world permeated by evil and we ultimately find it extremely difficult to believe (to experience in our bones) that God is good, that he loves us, and that we are safe in him. See, if we believed deeply that God was good, we would understand that even in those moments when we are under attack, when violence is done to us, when horrible things happen, God is good. Indeed many of us have never settled the question of whether or not God is good. And if you don’t believe God is good, then you can’t believe God really loves you. And if you can’t believe God really loves you, then you will live all of your life feeling like you must fend for yourself -- that in the final analysis, you must look out for #1 and get yours. And your life will be riddled with the fear that naturally comes with this belief, as you strike out against all people and situations that keep you from getting what you believe is coming to you, or cower from all people and situations that might threaten you. Either way, you will live as a slave to fear.
The sermon today is entitled Your Deepest Need. Your deepest need, my deepest need, is to live in the love of God. Nearly everything that plagues you -- your jealousy, your anger, your insecurity, your frustration, your depression, your sense of competition with those around you, your need for approval, your anxiety, your addictions, your obsessions and compulsions, your loneliness, your guilt, your regret, your fear of the future, your need to cover your brokenness and failure, your tendency to stretch the truth, your proneness to overreact to small things, your irritability, your need to always be right – all of these things, and much, much more – come from fear, which comes from failure to know and live in the love of God. What would it be like to live free from those things?
We don’t have time to cover it right now, but Jesus explained that freedom in the 6th chapter of Matthew when he talked about worry. He said do not worry about food, or clothing, or anything else. Jesus mentioned the birds, and the grass of the field, and how God attends to them. I hit a bird in my car a few weeks ago. Is it just me, or do the birds seem to be getting unusually daring this spring? They sit in the middle of the road until your car is almost right over them and then they quickly try to make a break for it. That’s what this robin did a couple weeks ago, only he was too late. I heard this thumping sound, then looked back and there was that robin laying lifeless on the pavement. And at that moment I thought about Jesus’ words,
Mt 6:26 (The Message)
26Look at the birds, free and unfettered, not tied down to a job description, careless in the care of God…
I thought, “What did living carefree get that bird? A whack upside the head, that’s what.” Then I realized something. The whack upside the head is coming for all of us – that’s life in this world. One day I’m going to die. So are you. The whack on the head is out there. Now what did this bird do? Up until the very instant that death came knocking (in my beautiful new Saturn Outlook!), that bird lived carefree in the care of God. It didn’t spend a single second of its life ever wondering and worrying, “I wonder what’ll take me out – will some cat get to me and rip me to shreds? Maybe a 10 year old boy with a BB gun? That electric wire that somehow grounds when I’m sitting on it and fries me?” None of that. Just living while there was living to be done, and then dying at the appointed time. That’s what God asks of us. Live carefree while we live. Jesus said:
Mt 6:34 (The Message)
34“Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes.
Jesus certainly modeled that kind of living for us. But we cannot give our entire attention to what God is doing if we do not trust that he is good, that he loves us, and that he will care for us. Consequently we spend hours and days and weeks and years of the only life we’ve been given worrying about how it will end, or fearing things that might make it harder, or getting worked up over the annoying things it contains, or even worrying and fretting over how we can make it more comfortable, or less uncomfortable.
Jas 4:1-3 (NIV)
1What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? 2You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. 3When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.
James is talking about what results when we decide to take up our own cause and get our own needs met rather than simply going to the Father and making our requests known. What is the alternative to this cycle of madness?
1 Jn 4:17-18 (The Message)
17God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us, so that we’re free of worry on Judgment Day—our standing in the world is identical with Christ’s. 18There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love.
The alternative is life in the love and care of God. Well-formed love banishes fear and as fear disappears, every other negative emotion will disappear as well.
Moms – none of you have perfect insight. None of you know what is best for your children in every situation. But you sure love the living daylights out of them, don’t you? You’d take a bullet for them, and you know it. You’d take on all their diseases, and suffer the consequences for all of their bad choices, if you thought for a moment that would be possible and good for them.
Moms, think about the difficulties you have with your children. Do they not often come because your children will not rest in your love? You know that everything you do for them is motivated by love. You know you have their interests at heart. You know that even if they suffer a bit of pain as a result of one of your decisions, it is only to spare them greater pain in the future. You know that at every second your wish is for their well-being. Yet they do not stop twitching. They sometimes want to do what is not good for them and they rebel in various ways against your attempts to protect their interests.
If this is true between imperfect children and their imperfect moms, how much truer is it between a perfect God and his imperfect children? A human being’s deepest need is the love of their heavenly Father. God will love us perfectly, but still we will twitch and chafe. We will still resort to foolery to get our own way.
The connection between last week and this week? Last week we talked about experiencing God. You experience God how? Through obedience. As we obey God, we will be more and more fully formed in what? In love! God will always lead us to do things that increase our capacity to receive his love, live in his love, and relate to others from that place.
But how does this happen? I want to talk to you about that next week, but not before I give away the text I’ll probably be using.
Mt 11:30 (The Message)
30Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”
The way this happens is by keeping company with and learning from Jesus. See, Jesus hasn’t actually called you to do anything, he has called you to learn how to do it. There’s a world of difference between doing something and learning to do something. Good thing Jesus has simply called you to learn how to do some things, because the truth is that you are not capable of doing most of what Jesus told you to do. But you are capable of learning. That’s what I want to talk to you about next week. Keeping company with Jesus and learning how to live freely and lightly. Remember, this just means learning to live in love, without fear. Jesus told us how to do this, and we can learn to do it if that is our desire and intention.
